Creating Personal Web Pages

TIG maintains a web server called people.csail.mit.edu for the purpose
of hosting personal web sites. To create and manage your web site you
will need a system with access to the CSAIL AFS cell such as
login.csail.mit.edu. Files placed in the public_html subdirectory of
your home directory will appear as
http://people.csail.mit.edu/username on the web.

AFS Permission for your Web Directory

In order to serve your pages, the Web server must have at least read
permissions on your public_html directory and at least lookup
permissions on your home directory. If you have scripts that need to
write to your Web directory, the server must also have write
permissions. By default, home directories are created with appropriate
permissions for read-only access, and the public_html directory will
inherit those defaults, but if you change the permissions on either,
here are the minimum requirements:

If you need to keep some of the data in your site private using
.htaccess files or other Web-server access control, you need to
change the permissions on the ~/public_html directory, or the
subdirectory of ~/public_html where those files are located, using
the following command:

fs setacl DIRECTORY-TO-PROTECT system:anyuser none www read

If you want to restrict access to the data to authenticated CSAIL
users (which includes the Web server) you can instead use:

Web Server Configuration and Features

This web server is configured permissively, please think of the possible
effects your actions will have on others. If certain features become
problematic, they will be removed.

So how permissive is it? All overrides are allowed in .htaccess files
and CGI script may be run from any directory. Currently perl (and the
CGI perl module) are installed as /usr/bin/perl (v5.6.1), there is a
/usr/local/bin/perl symlink for compatibility with scripts that expect
that. If you need additional languages or perl modules installed,
contact help@csail.mit.edu.

Server side includes are also supported using the .shtml extension or
the XBitHack, setting a .html file’s execute bit (chmod +x
<filename>) will cause it to be parsed by the server for includes.

Web server logs can be viewed by logging into the server that hosts your
website (e.g. people.csail.mit.edu for personal domains), and viewing
the access.log and error.log files in /var/log/apache2.

Personnel Directory Listing

To make the personnel directory on www.csail.mit.edu link to your
personal web page, add link to the field “WEBSITE” on your CSAIL profile
page. Any questions about this tool should be sent to
webmaster@csail.mit.edu.